Suggest on Google News

Posted by Corrie Scalisi and Ari Shotland, Software Engineers

Like many of our users, we were very excited when Google Suggest was incorporated into Google.com almost a year ago. The feature provides real-time suggestions while you search.

Today, we're happy to announce that we've enabled Suggest in all of our Google News editions in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. The feature can make your experience searching Google News better by helping you formulate queries, saving you keystrokes, correcting spelling mistakes and exposing you to queries you might not have thought of. The goal of all that? To get you to the articles you're looking for as quickly as possible.

As you can see, we've tuned our algorithm so that it presents suggestions that are particularly relevant for news-related queries:



We are working on enabling Suggest in other editions of Google News, so stay tuned!

Fantastic Performance at Cultural Festival

Last night 80 children from throughout the school, put on a most amazing performance at the Christchurch Town Hall, as part of the Christchurch Primary Schools Cultural Festival. The children were in two groups, the Junior Nga Matikao, and the Seniors as part of Te Tipuranga.  

Te Tipuranga had brought with them their kete of knowledge handed down to them by their treasured Tipuna. The children had photos of their special family members and ancestors in the kete.

During the performance two children used sign language to communicate  the  words of the waiata. 

 Nga Matikao celebrated the different cultures of our school in a colourful and lively performance. 

" I was really nervous, but when we got on stage everybody knew what to do and it was awesome! It made me real proud to be supporting my own school and I saw lots of my old friends from last year. "       Steve

"I got to wear my great, great, great Aunties piupiu, I felt very proud. And our girl's pukana at the end was 'funtastic' "      Brooke

"It felt good. I knew all the people liked us because they clapped and clapped"    Ben

Parents and Addington staff were very proud of all the children.

Conductive Education - One Small Victory but the Battle Continues

We have just been notified that our Therapy Funding has been reinstated. While this is great news unfortunately it is only for children who are presently on our school roll. We will not receive funding for any new students enrolling at our school. There is a review of Special Education to take place next year.

Check out this article in the Press Newspaper Saturday 15 August 2009. 

New Planter Box Arrives

Last Friday the Green Team was also busy assembling a planter box. This was kindly donated by Reg Platt of Fresh Harvest Planters. Reg delivered and then helped the Team to assemble the box. This planter is high sided so that our Conductive Ed children can access them from their wheelchairs. A big thank you to Harvest Planters for this. The school will be purchasing two more raised beds for our planned vegetable gardens, and the children are busy planning what they would like to grow.

Green Team prepare the Rose Garden

Over the past two Fridays, the Green Team has been busy in our Rose Garden, working compost into the soil, and discovering the joys of worms, centipedes, slugs and other grubs. The team have put compost and soil conditioner into the rose bed, so that planting of the blue and yellow pansies will be happening this week!! Thanks to Oderings Nursery who have given us a great deal on these plants, and another big thank you to Graeme Wood for all his help with the trailer and extra tools.

Looking Backward: Nominating a new Justice

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team

A few minutes ago, the United States Senate voted 68-31 in favor of confirming Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the newest addition to the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor's confirmation followed three days of debate on the Senate floor, and was preceded by a series of lengthy and widely-reported confirmation hearings in July. A simple search for [Sotomayor] on Google News yields articles from thousands of sources covering this developing story.

Judge Sotomayor will soon become part of an elite group of Americans, as the 111th Justice to serve on the Court. The process by which new Justices are vetted and confirmed for this powerful body has long been a subject of intense media interest. As history was being made this week, I took a look back using News Archive Search's Timeline view for the term [supreme court confirmation]. While browsing the archives, common threads in media coverage of Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings jumped out at me. I've included some articles below from the last 75 years of Supreme Court History.

These materials were made browsable via our News Archive Partner Program. You can easily click the navigation toolbar to zoom in and out on an article, or fit the entire newspaper page in your browsing window.

Click on each image or link to view an article in its original context:


Morning Star - Jul 23, 1993


St. Petersburg Times - Aug 13, 1937


The Deseret News. - Jul 5, 1987


Eugene Register-Guard - Mar 21, 1939

Pardon Our Dust: Temporary Issues with Webmaster Tools

Posted by Abe Epton, Publisher Support Team

Google News publishers have long made use of Webmaster Tools to submit and update their News sitemaps, as well as learn more about how Google is crawling their site. Recently, the Webmaster Tools site underwent a major makeover designed to make it easier for publishers to use. As part of this process, Google News is working to improve our interaction with Webmaster Tools and help news publishers take advantage of some of WMT's helpful new features.

Unfortunately, this also means that there are currently a few issues that publishers are seeing. We wanted to let you know what they were, and reassure you that we're working on them. While there may be some sawdust and loose nails lying around at the moment, it won't be long before a sturdy new edifice has been completed, and we think publishers will agree that the hard work will have been worth it. For the moment, however:

• Webmaster Tools may report an incorrect "Last downloaded" date for News sitemaps, display a strange number of articles indexed, or display a News sitemap as "Pending" () even though Google News is already crawling the sitemap. The best way to determine if we're crawling a sitemap or not is to check your server logs for Googlebot.
• From time to time, it may become necessary to resubmit your sitemap (for example, if the Type switches from News to Web). In order to do so, don't click the "Resubmit" button at the bottom of your sitemap list; instead, click the "Submit a Sitemap" link, select Google News from the Type dropdown box, and give us your sitemap's URL.

We apologize for the inconvenience these issues may be causing you. We're working hard to improve the sitemap submission experience, and think you'll be pleased with the results.

Extra! Extra! Updates from our growing newspaper archives

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google News Online Team

Last September on this blog, we announced a new initiative to digitize newspapers and make them accessible and searchable online.

We've recently updated our index, quadrupling the number of articles included in News Archive Search. We now include articles from several new publications, including the Halifax Gazette, Sydney Morning Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Village Voice. Working with our partners, we've also added new international publications such as the Manila Standard, The Nation from Thailand, and many others.

Looking for a place to start exploring this rich historical index? How about the complete June 2, 1753 edition of the Halifax Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers we've digitized to date.



News Archive Search is an ongoing effort, and we're continuing to work with publishers to add new materials. You can explore this historical treasure trove by searching on News Archive Search or by using the timeline feature after searching on Google News.